Being 'Pro-Arab'
The Freud Museum website has been recently criticised for displaying Freud's letter of Feburary 1930 in which he politely turns down a request to sign a petition condemning Arab riots against Jewish settlers ('Arab-Israeli conflict'). The criticism originally took the form of disagreement about the particular translation of the letter in question, and a new translation was proposed which I have appended to the original page. However I was more struck, in the exchange of emails, by a phrase which seemed to encapsulate the intractable emotional impasse in which partners to conflict often find themselves. I was accused of being 'pro-Arab'.The implication of this phrase was a world in which the dimensions of 'good' and 'bad', and 'right' and 'wrong', coincided with the categories of 'us' and 'them'. You are either on one side or the other, and the world is neatly divided into opposing camps.
Freud saw things differently. He was proud of being Jewish and took great strength from his heritage. How could he be Jewish and not 'anti-Arab'?
The solution to this paradox is quite simple. Freud did not think that being 'part of' something meant being unable to criticise it. In fact Freud thought that the ability to step outside one's immediate identifications and affinities was itself a mark of civilisation , albeit one rarely seen in practice. In his paper 'Thoughts for the Time on War and Death', written in 1915 at the height of the first world war and with his sons fighting on the front, Freud imagines a modern citizen of the world as he wished it could be:
"Anyone who was not by stress of circumstances confined to one spot could create for himself out of all the advantages and attractions of these civilised countries a new and wider fatherland, in which he could move about without hindrance or suspicion. ...This new fatherland was a museum for him too, filled with all the treasures which the artists of civilised humanity had in the successive centuries created and left behind. As he wandered from one gallery to another in this museum, he could recognise with impartial appreciation what varied types of perfection a mixture of blood, the course of history, and the special quality of their mother-earth had produced among his compatriots in this wider sense. " (SE14, p277).
The idyllic picture of free individuals in a free world is shattered by the outbreak of hate and loathing that was generated amongst these same 'civilised nations' in the war. The individual becomes dominated by the power of the state:
"Peoples are more or less represented by the states which they form, and these states by the governments which rule them. The individual citizen can with horror convince himself in this war of what would occasionally cross his mind in peace time - that the state has forbidden to the individual the practice of wrong-doing, not because it desires to abolish it, but because it desires to monopolise it, like salt and tobacco. A belligerent state permits itself every such misdeed, every such act of violence, as would disgrace the individual.... The state exacts the utmost degree of obedience and sacrifice from its citizens, but at the same time it treats them like children by an excess of secrecy and a censorship upon news and expressions of opinion.... It absolves itself from the guarantees and treaties by which it was bound to other states, and confesses shamelessly to its own rapacity and lust for power, which the private individual has then to sanction in the name of patriotism" (p279-280)
Just as Freud once advocated that a psychoanalyst with religious convictions would have to resolve the inevitable contradictions for himself, so our critic will have to resolve the tensions between his patriotic allegiance and Freud's quite different attitude.